Ginger & Coconut Surprise Cake

I'll cut to the chase here - the 'surprise' in this cake is that it tasted quite as good as it did, given my penchant for adapting with impunity.

I managed to sneak in a baking session on Saturday afternoon, chores done, children delivered and recovered from various activities, dog walked. As the rest of the household settled for rugby induced over-excitement, I sidled into my happy place, emptied the cupboards and got a bake on. A lasagne for Sunday (ragu already made and defrosted, so a mere assembly job) - something easy to pop in the oven after our planned Mothers Day activity of a walk and picnic on the beach; some experimental gluten free brownies, of which more another day when I've sorted out the slight oiliness from slightly too much coconut oil; pizza for post-rugby match appetites (shouting at the TV can make people awfully hungry...) and this cake.

Getting my bake on...

Again adapting from Short & Sweet by Dan Lepard, this is my version of the ginger root cake, the adaptations mostly based on using up what was in the cupboard. You'll be pleased to hear that I now have less than half a bottle of pomegranate molasses in my possession, and although I have found several very good uses for it, I'm not sure I'll be rushing to purchase another bottle.

Anyway, back to this cake. It's not a straightforward cake flavour-wise, but the molasses and ginger complement each other, with the addition of coconut rounding things off. It worked as cake on its own, and also as pudding, topped with some homegrown rhubarb, simply stewed.

And if you were interested, this cake also contains swede. Yes, the vegetable. Not Ulrika Johnsson. And unlike my last attempt to include swede in a cake, this appears to have gone undetected. That'll teach them for watching the rugby...


Ginger & Coconut Surprise Cake

2 large eggs
100g light soft brown sugar
100g pomegranate molasses
150 ml coconut oil
150g grated swede
2 nuggets of stem ginger, finely chopped
175g wholemeal flour
50g dessicated coconut
2 tsp baking powder
1 tsp bicarb of soda
2 tsp ground ginger

for the icing
100g icing sugar
lemon juice (probably about 1/4 lemon)

Line a 20cm round springform cake tin and pre-heat the oven to 180C.

Separate one of the eggs and set the white aside for later. Beat together the while egg and second yolk with the sugar until it becomes thick and lightens in colour - at least 5 minutes.

Beat in the molasses and coconut oil, then stir in the swede and chopped ginger.

Mix together the flour, coconut, raising agents and ground ginger, then add this into the mixture.

Take the remaining egg white and whist to the soft peak stage, then fold this evenly through the batter.

Scrape this into the tin and bake for around 40 minutes - it's OK if a few crumbs come out on the cake tester.

Once the cake has cooled, remove it from the tin and make up the icing. Sieve the icing sugar and combine with the lemon juice to make a thick-ish icing. Ice your cake as artfully as you like, and enjoy.

Lemon caramel cake

I love food. That's why I have a food blog. There's not much that I won't try, not much I don't like. But there are a few flavours that I keep going back to. Smoked paprika. Almonds. Lemon.

I'd be hard pressed to choose between lemon and almond, particularly when talking about cake (I haven't yet added smoked paprika to a cake) and I'll often seek to combine the 2 rather than choose, but today, it's all about lemon cake. Yet another one, I know, to join Felicity Cloake's perfect lemon drizzle cake (which does include almonds), the lemon cake with feathered icing, a lemon and blackcurrant cake...

This is another bake based on a Dan Lepard classic from Short & Sweet where it appears as Lemon Butter Cake. There's a version of this loaf cake online on the Guardian Life & Style pages from 2006 - slightly different to that which appears in print, but the constant ingredient is condensed milk, one of my other culinary loves. You might think the combination of lemon and condensed milk would be one that I'd find hard to resist, but in fact I've pondered the possibility for some time and never been quite sure. One of the joys of lemon is its sharpness - would the addition of condensed milk take that away?

Well, the fact is that I've had some tinned caramel in the fridge for far too long, left over from making my favourite flapjacks, so in the end, I didn't use condensed milk at all, and here's the result. No cloying sweetness, just a deliciously sharp, moist loaf cake, with massive mouth-appeal.  .

Dan may bake with integrity - me, I just use up what I've got in the fridge. Either way, this is a mighty fine cake.

Lemon Caramel Cake

100g unsalted butter
2 large eggs
150g caster sugar
125g tinned caramel
grated zest of 2 lemons
Juice of 1.5 large lemons (save the other half for the icing)
275g plain flour
2 tsp baking powder

100g icing sugar
Juice of 1/2 a lemon

Line a large loaf tin with baking paper and pre-heat the oven to 180C.

Melt the butter and set aside.

Separate the eggs and measure out 25g of the caster sugar. Whisk the whites till frothy then tip in the sugar with the whisk still running until the mix forms soft peaks. Set the bowl aside.

Beat together the melted butter, the egg yolks, the remaining 125g caster sugar, the caramel, lemon zest and lemon juice until the sugar has dissolved and the mixture is smooth and caramel coloured.

Sift the flour and baking powder into the egg yolk mixture and beat together till smooth, then fold in the egg whites till combined and scrape the mixture into the prepared loaf tin.

Bang the tin a couple of times to evenly distribute the mixture, then bake for 40-50 minutes till a skewer comes out almost clean.

Leave the cake to cool, then make up the icing by combining the icing sugar with the juice of half a lemon to make quite a runny icing. Drizzle this over the loaf.

Lemon & Almond Buns - A Random Recipe

There always comes a time when there's a change of routine when you need to bring out the big guns. It's a watershed moment that can be easy to spot if you've experienced it a few times. 

Things are different, no-one's really settled into whatever the change is. Comfort and indulgence is the order of the day to get everyone over the hump and get on with the rest of whatever it is.

Comfort came bun shaped today

I've observed this on Scout Camp the last few years. usually around Day 3. That's when we pull out the biscuits and the hot chocolate at bed time, do some mass jollying along.

Here in the RJ household, we had our own jollying along moment on Sunday morning.

The Husband headed off last Monday for what is probably the longest time he's been away from us since he left the Army. While he's sitting in the desert, surrounded by 'MaMBA' (No, not snakes, Miles and Miles of Bugger All), posting the occasional photo of a lizard on Facebook, Blue, Pink, Fred the Dog, the chickens and I have been trying to sort out a new modus operandi, not required for the shorter trips he's often making. There has been a Daddy-less 7th birthday and a couple of late nights because somehow things have slipped. There has been fractious bickering, there have been tears. The kids are responsible for feeding the chickens and watering the greenhouse - I am responsible for making sure they remember they are responsible. There has been an angry moment (mine) with the lawn mower (don't go there), and more tears (the kids) when the internet occasionally fails to allow Skype to work for the brief period of time when a conversation with Daddy is appropriate.

When I selected my Random Recipe for Dom's challenge for this month -  'Bread' , I wasn't really sure when I'd get round to baking and entering the challenge. My selection of bread baking books and bread baking sections of books included the Sweet & Fruit breads chapter in 'Short & Sweet' by Dan Lepard, and this recipe was where my page flicking ended up. Lemon & Almond Buns - "... a lemon flavoured butter dough that bakes like brioche around a gooey core of marzipan..." Delicious, sure, but a month full of camping, working out my notice at work and preparing to go freelance, sailing the ship on my own, I wasn't sure that there would be time.

Well, may be there wasn't time, but what became apparent over Saturday was that time or not, the kids needed some indulgence. This would normally have been a cinammon bun moment, but instead, the moment for Lemon & Almond Buns arose.

Now, having already fallen foul of Mr Lepard's rather zealous business manager in the past check out the comments), I am not going to even begin to repeat the recipe here. However for those of you wishing to recreate these beautiful buns, you will be pleased to know that they were published in the Guardian Online in 2006 and you can find the recipe here.

Pretty straightforward, although you need to start the night before to get a rough dough into the fridge, and if you want them for breakfast before about 9, you need to be up just before 7, which is fine unless you've had more than a couple of glasses of morale boosting wine with your lovely and supportive neighbours after you've manhandled the kids into bed, tears wiped, stories read,  in which case you might end up having breakfast a little later on...

It's an enriched, lemon scented bread dough which needs little kneading.

From this...

You roll it out into a 70cm by 10cm rectangle, 

to this

then put a sausage of marzipan into the middle of the rectangle and seal the dough over it before slicing into pieces, proving and baking.

The only thing that I can tell you about the recipe is that I had no flaked almonds in, so instead of brushing the cooked buns with melted butter, sprinkling with toasted flaked almonds and dredging with icing sugar, I made up a runny lemon icing using the juice of a lemon (the zest had already gone into the dough), and then sprinkled with poppy seeds.

What can I say? The lemony brioche type bread was light, lemony (as promised) and delicious. The marzipan was oozy and heavenly. The kids LOVED it, and have requested a repeat performance next week, and the next. And strangely enough, everything calmed down today. 

10 days to go...